


Our every day in paradise

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff and Humor, M/M, Marriage Proposal, no bicycles were harmed in the writing of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-20
Updated: 2018-09-20
Packaged: 2019-07-14 15:08:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16042955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: A suspect asks Steve and Danny how long they’ve been married, and what else is new, really? The answer, much to Danny’s confusion: how nervous Steve gets about that stupid question.Or: Steve has a plan, for once, but he’s Steve McGarrett, so of course the universe isn’t going to let that work out for him.





	Our every day in paradise

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by every single time someone in canon asks them how long they’ve been married. Originally this was going to be them, actually married, giving an unexpectedly real answer to a question meant to rile them up, but it turned into this instead, because Steve is a beautiful disaster of a human being and I love him. 
> 
> Title from a Rumi quote: “May this marriage be full of laughter, our every day in paradise.”

Steve steals a bike – not one like Chin’s, big and bad and fuel-driven, but the kind involving pedals and exercise – and jumps their perp while driving it full speed downhill. The bike rolls on without him, somehow keeping balance long enough to only crash at the very end of the road, where it skids the last handful of feet and disappears over the edge of the cliff. It’s kind of comical. It’s there one second and gone the next, but Danny is out of breath and annoyed and wound up from this latest suspect trying to make a break for it (why can’t they ever just admit defeat?), so he yells at Steve anyway, just for the hell of it.

“Are you serious?” he shouts, pretty pleased with how loud he manages to be in between his panting. He is in excellent condition, thank you very much, but unlike certain SEALs, he did not get to enjoy the advantages of a bike in combination with gravity. “That was someone’s property! Which you _stole_ -”

“Borrowed,” Steve interjects, but Danny ploughs right on over him.

“-and have now _thrown off a cliff_ , like it’s a suspect who didn’t give you the answers you wanted. What did that bike ever do to you, Steve, huh? Or do you just like polluting the environment in creative new ways?”

Steve is kneeling next to the suspect, who is face down on the dirt road. He pauses in the process of cuffing the guy to look at the cliff’s edge, the set of his jaw mulish. “I’ll buy them a new one.”

“You?” Danny helps him drag the perp up to a standing position, but then lets go to wave his hands at him properly. “ _You_ ’ll buy them a new one? I’d like to see the day you get out your wallet for anything. I know you, babe. You’ll find a way to put this under work expenses and you’ll make the fine upstanding citizens of Hawaii pay for your bike destroying habits with their tax dollars.”

“How long have you two been married?” the perp sneers.

Danny is all ready to call him out for his lack of originality, but a sudden change in Steve’s manners stops him.

“You alright?” Danny asks, completely forgetting that he was still yelling at Steve.

If possible, Steve starts to look even more shifty. “Yep!” he says, almost cheerful, which is so out of character it really gets Danny worried. Steve gives the perp a shove, and they start the march back up the hill to where they parked the car because the road grew too narrow to keep driving.

“You look a little freaked,” Danny points out. He goes back through the last minute to see what could have set Steve off, but there’s really only one possibility. He huffs a laugh that he hopes sounds genuine, and not as awkward and empty as he suddenly feels. “Don’t worry, buddy, I’m not expecting a ring just because I spend more nights at your place than at my own.” 

That’s an understatement, really – he thinks maybe the last time he stopped by his own shitty apartment was three weeks ago, but even then he didn’t spend the night there and it says something that he’s not even sure if it wasn’t longer ago – but Danny doesn’t want to push Steve any further, for once. He’s not sure he’d like the results.

One of Steve’s hands twitches. “Oh?” he asks, carefully neutral. He looks like he’s defusing a bomb, not like they’ve just caught their suspect and were bickering as usual a moment ago. 

Danny doesn’t know how this went south so quickly. They’ve been together for over two years. Maybe Danny had expected a freak-out on Steve’s part at the start of it all, but it never came. It seems a little late now. 

“Damn, you’re being weird about this,” their perp says to Steve, which is really not helpful and Danny kind of wants to punch him for it, but he also wants to kiss him, because it’s absolutely true as well. “It was just a joke, man, what the hell. How homophobic are you?”

“I’m not homophobic,” Steve says.

Danny throws his arms up. “Oh, look! He can string words together to form a sentence! Who would’ve thunk, huh, after your recent monosyllabic contributions to this conversation?”

The perp squints at Steve. “Are you sure? You seem really bothered by all of this.”

“It doesn’t bother me!” Steve shouts, which might be the surest possible way to signal to everyone and their blind mother that he’s lying. Steve’s right hand dips into the pocket of his cargo pants. “Let’s just… not do this right now, okay?”

“Do what?” the perp asks. He’s either suicidal and actively trying to rile up the guy who’s got him shackled and has a gun, or is a lot more concerned with gay rights than Danny would have given him credit for.

Still, Danny finds he has to side with him. “Yes, do what, Steven? I wasn’t even aware we were doing anything that we could stop doing.”

Steve’s eyes go slightly murderous. He breathes out through his nose, hard, and gives the perp a slap on the back that has the guy wincing. “Why did you have to bring up marriage _today_ of all days, huh? I had this all planned out.”

The perp goes wide eyed. “Oh man,” he says. “I get it. Oh, I’m sorry.”

Danny feels like there is something, in a deep, dark corner of his mind, that wants to say click. Other, saner parts of his brain keep telling him that he can’t possibly be working with the right puzzle pieces, despite how well they seem to fit together. 

“Planned out?” he asks. “What do you mean, planned out?”

Steve quits walking. He lets go of the perp completely to turn to Danny, who had been trailing behind them. The perp is nice enough not to make a hopeless break for it, but just stand there and wait for them to sort their shit out. Danny thinks he could really like him if he didn’t know the guy had stolen three very expensive paintings and indirectly gotten someone killed over it.

“It means I had a plan,” Steve says, waving the hand that’s not in his pocket in a very Danny-like manner. Danny would tease him about it if he had a chance to get a word in edgewise, but Steve just keeps talking. “We were going to go to a nice restaurant and eat some good steaks, and I would cover the bill and you would rant at me affectionately all the way back home about how hell must have frozen over because I’m such a cheap bastard usually, and then I’d park you out on the lanai – not the beach, because I know you don’t like how the sand gets everywhere – and I’d steel my nerves as I got two beers and then we’d drink them watching the sunset and I’d ask, then and there.”

“That was the plan?”

“That was the plan,” Steve confirms.

“Steve,” Danny says, and he can’t help it if he sounds a little strangled at this point. “You were going to ask me _what_ , exactly?”

Steve extracts his hand from his pocket forcefully, like one would remove a bandage. He’s hiding something in his palm, which he holds out to Danny, uncurling his fingers just enough so Danny can see what it is.

He still needs a moment, because it’s a ring box. The kind people put rings in. Which are in boxes.

_Engagement_ rings.

“I asked Grace last week-” Steve starts, but Danny waves him off before he can get anywhere. Danny is sure he sounds breathless again, but this time it’s got nothing to do with chasing down suspects or not having access to a bike.

“Grace? You asked Grace, my daughter, for my hand in marriage?”

“Yes,” Steve says, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like there’s a fond ‘of course, you idiot’ at the end of it. “And she said yes.”

“Oh. Well. If my _daughter_ thinks it’s okay, it must be a good idea.”

Steve somehow frowns and pouts at the same time. “It’s not like that. Obviously, you can say no, and I told Grace to be prepared for that possibility, but I know how important Gracie is to you and I love her too, you know, so I wanted to make sure she’d be on board before I even asked you, because there was no way I would have even considered-”

Steve stops talking abruptly when Danny takes the ring box from him. Steve’s now empty hand hovers in the air for a moment before he drops it to his side.

Danny takes a deep breath and opens the box.

“You know,” he says, as casually as he can muster while drinking in the image of a plain gold band on a white cushion that Steve bought for him, “after the whole disaster with Rachel, I never thought I’d ever want to get married again.”

“I know,” Steve says. When Danny manages to tear his eyes away from the ring, Steve looks crestfallen, but also like he’s trying (and failing) to hide his disappointment. “I get that. I understand if you’re still-”

“Babe,” Danny says, to put a stop to it before Steve can start rambling again. It’s interesting to know that there are things that can cause Steve to do that, but it’s not interesting enough to make Danny want to torture him any longer. Or torture himself, for that matter. “That wasn’t me trying to let you down easy. You’re an idiot. I’ll marry you. Of course I will, dumbass.”

Steve’s eyes are huge and blue and should come with a warning label. A guy could drown in them, right here on land. “You will?”

“Yes,” Danny says, almost laughs, and he’s not sure if it’s because this is funny or because he can’t believe this is his life or because Steve has just finally, finally driven him completely and irrevocably crazy. It’s possible it’s a mix of all three and then some. “Yes, Steven, I will.”

“But- Rachel-”

God help Danny, but he’s in love with an idiot. “Listen, babe, I know and appreciate that this isn’t what you had in mind and that this already counts as a pretty botched proposal, but not arguing with me when I say yes is kind of a low bar to jump over. You wouldn’t even have to jump, really, you could just-” Danny mimes some things with his hands that he’s not sure even he understands. It doesn’t help that he’s trying to be careful about the ring. “Step, you know?”

“Right,” Steve says, like that made sense. “Right, okay.” His eyes wander down from Danny’s face, where they’ve been glued for a while now, to Danny’s hand, which is still holding the open ring box.

Steve takes a very welcome step into his personal space and steals the box back. He says nothing as he takes out the ring, lets the closed box slip back into his pocket and gently grasps Danny’s left hand. Danny does not cry, because that would be ridiculous, but he might blink a couple of times in pure amazement when Steve slips the gold band onto his finger.

When Danny looks up, Steve fucking _beams_ at him like Danny is personally responsible for not just hanging the sun in the sky, but also saving a whole truckload of puppies from armed terrorists.

“Kiss him,” whispers someone who’s not Steve, loudly. It’s their perp, whose presence Danny had frankly forgotten about. 

Danny flips him the bird, and then does as he’s told anyway. Steve leans down into him, warm and solid and wonderful, all the while never letting go of Danny’s newly accessorized hand. Danny, for once, doesn’t complain, even though it limits him to five fingers he can slide into the hair at the nape of Steve’s neck to make Steve shiver.

When they break for air, Steve presses their foreheads together. “I love you,” he pants, which Danny consider something of an ego boost in too many ways to count.

“I love you too,” he sighs.

“Aw, my heart is full.” Danny glances at the perp out of the corner of his eye, annoyed, to find him smiling dreamily. Danny knows the feeling – or knew, until he was rudely interrupted. The perp doesn’t seem to realize or care. “Just for letting me be a part of that,” he goes on happily, “I’ll tell you where the bomb is.”

“Hey, none of that, you were not a part of any-” Danny starts, but then freezes. He exchanges a look with Steve, and they break apart as if it was planned that way, which is funny, because that applies to absolutely nothing about this situation or Danny’s life for the past couple of years. 

Steve grabs their perp by the arm again and half marches, half drags him up the hill, double time. “What’s this about a bomb?”

Danny dials Chin’s number to inform him and Kono of this latest development in the case, and also jogs after Steve, and also can’t stop touching his left ring finger and feeling like the most stupidly happy man in the world, all at the same time. It’s a good thing he’s a multitasker.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Comments are celebrated and cherished deeply. <3
> 
> If you want to find me on Tumblr, I'm [itwoodbeprefect](itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com).


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